How do I Bundle Billable Expenses and add Markup to Invoices
We do mostly Time and Material projects for customers in QBO. These projects might take weeks or months. We might have hundreds of expenses ranging from a couple of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. These could be fuel purchases, hotel charges, supply purchases, and some flow through Purchase Orders and many do not. We use Projects inside QBO and we mark all expenses and purchases as billable and assign them to their respective Project. So far so good.
When we invoice the customer, we use only a few line items to capture all of these costs into categories such as Parts & Equipment, Consumables, Rentals, Travel Expenses, Contract Labor, etc. We do NOT list every individual expense on the invoice which would result in dozens of pages for each billing. That would be insane and our customers do not want that, nor do we.
Currently, we run reports for all expenses related to a project, then add these totals to the line items on the invoice manually. Unfortunately, this leaves all of these hundreds of expenses as unbilled in QBO. It also makes keeping track of what has been billed and what hasn't been billed very difficult. There is currently no way I am aware of to mark unbilled activity as billed without adding it to an invoice. Seems like a Catch-22.
My thought was to use BUNDLES (in service items) to solve this problem. It works beautifully to hide all of the expenses and consolidate them to a single line item. However, there is no way to add markup to the entire bundle or edit the subtotal which leaves us unable to use this method. Maybe I'm missing something?
Does anyone know of how to add billable expenses to an invoice so they are not individually visible to the customer while still being able to mark them up? If that is not yet possible, is there some workaround to mark billable expenses in a Project as billed?